Mistaken identity

Since the July 7 bombings much attention has been focused on the Muslim community, while attacks on Hindus and Sikhs have been largely ignored. Shivani Nagarajah talks to non-Muslim Asians about feeling under siege

If you travel on London's public-transport system you may have spotted them: stickers and T-shirts with "Don't freak, I'm a Sikh" written across them. On the tube, they tend to be greeted with wry smiles, but they have sparked heated debate on Sikh online message boards. "Don't wear these T-shirts, they're anti-Muslim," writes one contributor. "We should wear the T-shirts," says another. "We need to think of ourselves first - let the Muslims take care of themselves."

In the weeks following July 7 it was widely reported that hate crimes against Asians had increased dramatically. They were not just attacks on Muslim Asians, of course: they were attacks on Asians of all faiths. The fact is that your average hate-crime perpetrator isn't going to stop and ask what religion you are before attacking you - or even care, for that matter, about such distinctions. But this point seems to have been lost on the media. There's been a huge focus on the impact on Britain's Muslim community, but the plight of Britain's 560,000 Hindus and 340,000 Sikhs has been largely ignored.

So to what extent have non-Muslim Asians been the victims of hate crimes? On July 7, as speculation grew that the London bombs were the work of Islamist extremists, the first reported hate crime took place in Erith, Kent: a Sikh gurdwara (place of worship) was firebombed. Since then the Sikh Federation (UK), a lobby group which represents more than 150 Sikh organisations, has recorded five further attacks on gurdwaras and two serious assaults on Sikh individuals. And as Jagtar Singh, of the federation's national executive council, points out, there is a huge problem of under-reporting, particularly in the case of less serious attacks. "For every crime reported to the authorities, we estimate another 30 to 40 that go unreported," he says.

Dal Singh Dhesy, a community worker with the Sikh community and youth centre in Handsworth, Birmingham, thinks that Sikhs have had a worse time of it than Muslims - because of their turbans. There is a grim irony to this: turbans are a potent symbol of Sikh identity, but, somehow, certain sections of the white population have come to (wrongly) associate them with Islamist extremists. "The turban-wearing Sikh community is under siege," he says. He experiences name-calling and stares from white people on a daily basis, and describes other Sikhs facing physical attack and intimidation.

This doesn't mean that Hindus have had an easy time of it. "There are issues of security for Hindu temples, Hindu students at university and Hindus walking on the streets who risk being assaulted," says Ramesh Kallidai, secretary general of the Hindu Forum of Britain, which speaks for 240 Hindu organisations.

Ishvar Guruswamy is a Hindu who has lived in Kent for 32 years. He had never experienced racism until shortly after the attempted bombings in London, when a group of teenagers spat at him while shouting, "Bomb, bomb, bomb." A few days later, a family at his local supermarket shouted the same thing at him. When he told his sister what had happened, her advice was simple - to shave off his beard and wear a large crucifix so no one would mistake him for a Muslim.

He has not followed her advice, but others are making an effort to advertise their faith. Ratnes Kandiah, a Hindu grandmother from east London, says: "When I go out I'm very ashamed because people don't know if I'm Hindu or Muslim." She has started wearing an extra large pottu, the red spot that Hindu women wear on their forehead, in the perhaps optimistic belief that people will understand its significance."I try to order pork and make sure that people hear me," says Mital Pankhania, a Hindu optometrist in his late 20s who lives in Derby. "If there are strangers around I make a point of saying that I drink. It's a bit like being a Canadian and always having to tell people you're not American."

Tariq Modood, professor of sociology at Bristol University, says it's understandable that Sikhs and Hindus should attempt to distance themselves from Muslims. "If a group has bad press or is seen as likely to drag you down in terms of your social status or the way you are perceived by the rest of society, then you want to distance yourselves from that group," he says. "At the moment, Muslims are certainly playing that role for other south Asians." Does he blame non-Muslims for backing away from Muslims? "Their motives are not good, they're selfish, but on the whole ... I don't deplore it, I regret it."

Of course, the divisions between different Asian groups didn't start on 7/7. In Derby, Pankhania says that although he has a mixed circle of friends, including Sikhs and white Christians, there are no Muslims among them. "I went to university in Bradford," he says. "I really grew to despise them [Muslims]. It didn't come from my parents but from my first-hand experience of living with them." Such attitudes are not uncommon.

It wasn't always this way. Many of the older generation of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims speak with real sadness about how things have changed. They describe how the early south Asian settlers to Britain saw one another as brothers and sisters, unified by a common heritage and shared sense of isolation. Until the 1980s, Asians organised collectively, with groups such as the Bradford Asian Youth Movement cutting across religious divisions. All this came to an end with the Salman Rushdie affair and the subsequent development of a distinct British Muslim identity. "Muslim identity rocketed off with one controversy after another, post-Rushdie," says Modood. "It became very difficult to develop an Asian identity which included other faiths."

According to Roger Ballard, director of the Centre for Applied South Asian Studies at Manchester University, this polarisation on religious grounds, particularly between Muslims and non-Muslims, is growing. He thinks that young Asians don't hang out together as much as they used to, especially at university. "They've been educated in barmy notions of political identity," he says. Where the immigrant generation saw a common tie to south Asia, these young Britons focus on religious differences, and often get their information from extremist sources. "They have no access to their history, no appreciation of their culture, so instead they embrace a very crude form of identity politics."

Ballard believes that this is as true of young Sikhs and Hindus as it is of Muslims. For example, he is concerned by how the ultra-nationalist VHP (World Hindu Council) is exploiting the London bombings to gain support, particularly among young Gujaratis. "Its line is, 'We Hindus are entirely different from Muslims. We've been victims of terrorism by Muslims and we stand shoulder to shoulder with the Brits.'"

According to Jagtar Singh of the Sikh Federation, there are a number of towns and cities in the UK with tensions between Sikhs and Muslims, "especially among the youngsters.". He mentions Birmingham and west London; others mention Leicester, Slough and Derby. The scale of the conflict is difficult to quantify, but Gurharpal Singh, professor of interreligious relations at the University of Birmingham, says that it is a real problem. Professor Singh believes that the main cause of these tensions is a rise in the numbers of Muslims in areas that have traditionally had large Sikh and Hindu populations. However, he says, other factors - including events in India and concerns about the activities of radical Muslim groups - play a part.

There are non-Muslim Asians prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim community in its time of need. "Most people I know are proud to be British Asians," says Amar Singh, editor of the multi-faith Eastern Eye. He believes that "if anything, the backlash against the Asian community since 7/7 has reinforced the idea of a collective British Asian identity".

But I hear a different story time and time again from Sikhs and Hindus across the country. Mahendra Dabhi describes an event he held recently for sixth-formers in Birmingham: their main concern was to establish a Hindu identity before going to university. "They felt that if they didn't differentiate themselves, they would be at risk of social stigma. They wanted to say, 'We are Hindus, we are not with them [Muslims]. We play cricket with them and we mix together fine, but we are different.' "

· The author is writing under a pseudonym. Some other names in the article have also been changed